2004-08-31 - 3:40 p.m.
Here are the condensed impressions of the events of the summer tour. Sorry it’s taken so long but with no laptop on the road and busy, busy, busy when I’m home…well you know.
Tues., June 2nd
Drive day to Oxnard, Ca. Endless desert culminating in the urban sprawl of north L.A. Highlight of the trip:
Driving trough hundreds of windmills as we come to the end of the desert.
Weds. June 23rd
Our first taste of the lovely So. Cal. Traffic on the way to Soho Club in Santa Barbara. The crowds down but I found a great comic shop around the corner.
Thurs., June 24th
Up early. Stupidly long drive to The Independent in San Francisco. Got there too late to catch the great record shop right down the block! Had absolutely fantastic barbeque right across the street. It’s always fun playing in S.F.! A real good singer/songwriter opened up by the name of Patrice Pike.
Fri., June 25th
Another stupidly long drive to L.A. We started to hit really bad traffic just as we entered the L.A. National Forest. I was driving and I see black smoke billowing into the air up around the bend. When we round the corner we see that a big R.V. on the other side of the highway was engulfed in flames! What looks to be its owners are standing about 100 yards away and staring in disbelief. Just then we notice that there’s even more smoke off in the distance and the traffic doesn’t get much better within our view. The forest is ablaze just up ahead and it doesn’t look too good. A helicopter trailing a big bucket comes toward the R.V. to dump a shit load of water on it and scores a direct hit! Nothing! The fire roars on. He came back and it was déjà vu all over again and …still nothing! By now we had inched about 5 or 10 car lengths past the R.V. A rather large airplane is making a beeline right for us and veers off and makes a loop around behind us. It comes in at a couple hundred miles an hour and about 60 feet off the ground, dropping a ton of red fire retardant right on the R.V. The downwash pushes the van down as the plane zooms right over us! “Whump!” and off it goes! A bunch of the cars right behind us got covered in red shit! Had we of got on the scene 10 minutes earlier that would have included us! Fire was creeping from the R.V. up the hill along side. The came back and dumped some more red shit on that and that was it. We crept up the hill until we could plainly see the fire fighters on several ridges battling the fire. We made the gig a little late but the excitement for the day was clearly behind us!
That’s all for now. More soon…..promise!
